Pallekele International Cricket Stadium Guide

Pallekele opened on 27 November 2009, about fifteen kilometres east of Kandy along the A26, and it became the 104th ground in the world to stage a Test match. It cost somewhere under four million United States dollars to build and seats around thirty-five thousand, which makes it one of the largest cricket grounds in Sri Lanka and comfortably the largest outside Colombo.

Its purpose was straightforward. Kandy had staged Test cricket at Asgiriya, a school ground on a hillside with a famously awkward slope and no capacity for a modern crowd or a modern broadcast operation. Pallekele was built to replace it with something an international schedule could use.

Whether the replacement has been fully used is a separate question, and one this page comes back to. Pallekele has staged a modest number of Tests and rather more limited-overs cricket, and it has produced a disproportionate share of Sri Lanka's most memorable short-format moments.

Hunnasgiriya and Rikillagaskada

The ground's two ends are named Hunnasgiriya and Rikillagaskada, after hill settlements in the surrounding district. It is a small detail and a telling one: this is a Central Province ground built in a rural setting rather than an urban one, ringed by hills, with none of the enclosed intensity of a Colombo club ground.

The setting is the ground's principal asset for spectators. It is green, open, and cooler than the coast or the dry-zone interior, and the view out of the ground is of hill country rather than of buildings. Anyone who has sat through a day match in Colombo's heat will recognise the difference immediately.

What it replaced

Pallekele exists because Asgiriya could not continue, and Asgiriya is worth understanding to see what was lost as well as what was gained.

Asgiriya Stadium belongs to Trinity College, Kandy, and was for years the only Test-class cricket ground in the world run by a secondary school. It seats around ten thousand, it sits on a hillside with a pronounced slope across the playing area, and ESPNcricinfo has called it one of the most scenic grounds in the game. It staged 21 Tests between April 1983, when Sri Lanka played Australia there, and December 2007. It also staged the 1996 World Cup match in which Sri Lanka made 398 for five against Kenya, at the time the highest total in one-day international cricket.

Its last Test, against England from 1 to 5 December 2007, is the one everybody remembers: Muttiah Muralitharan passed Shane Warne's Test wicket record during it. A school ground in the hills, with a slope, hosted the moment the leading wicket-taker in Test history took the lead.

What Asgiriya could not do was hold a modern crowd, a modern broadcast compound or a modern hospitality operation, and no amount of affection for a hillside was going to change that. Pallekele took the fixtures three years later, with three and a half times the capacity and floodlights, and Asgiriya went back to being a school ground — which, given what it produced, is not a demotion.

1 December 2010

Test cricket arrived against the West Indies, from 1 to 5 December 2010, and produced a piece of trivia the ground has kept.

Suranga Lakmal took a wicket with the very first ball bowled in a Test match at the new venue. At the time, only two bowlers in the history of the game had done that at a new Test ground. It is the kind of statistic that could easily have belonged to nobody, and it went to a young Sri Lankan seamer at his own country's newest ground.

The Test itself was one of nine that Pallekele has staged. Sri Lanka's record there is modest by home standards — a couple of wins, several draws and a handful of defeats — which is worth noting because Sri Lanka's home Test record generally is formidable. The country's fortress is Galle, not Kandy, and the reason is that Pallekele does not turn in the same way or at the same point in a match.

The name that was never changed

In July 2010, the Central Provincial Council in Kandy announced that the ground would be renamed after Muttiah Muralitharan. The renaming was never made official, and the venue is still Pallekele International Cricket Stadium.

The proposal was not eccentric. Muralitharan is from Kandy, and no cricketer in the country's history has a stronger claim on a ground in his home province. That the change was announced and then quietly did not happen is a reasonably characteristic episode in Sri Lankan cricket administration, where provincial bodies, the national board and the government have overlapping interests in what stadiums are called.

The tournament ground

Pallekele's real value to Sri Lanka Cricket has been as a global-tournament venue with a big capacity outside the capital.

Its first one-day international was a 2011 World Cup group match between New Zealand and Pakistan on 8 March 2011, and it staged three matches at that tournament. It then took a much larger share of the 2012 World Twenty20, hosting around nine matches including group fixtures and Super Eight games, in a tournament the West Indies won by beating Sri Lanka in the final in Colombo. The 2012 World Twenty20 is the tournament that established the ground internationally.

Its next major assignment is already fixed. Pallekele is scheduled to host seven matches at the 2026 Men's T20 World Cup, which is the largest allocation the venue has ever received and reflects both its capacity and its floodlights.

Between tournaments the ground carries Lanka Premier League cricket and the bulk of Sri Lanka's home limited-overs fixtures outside Colombo. Across its history it has staged something approaching forty one-day internationals and around twenty-five Twenty20 internationals, with Sri Lanka holding a small edge in both.

The balance of that programme is the ground's defining characteristic and, depending on your view, its problem. In roughly fifteen years it has staged fewer than ten Tests and something over sixty limited-overs internationals. A thirty-five-thousand-seat stadium with floodlights, built to replace a Test venue, has ended up functioning mainly as a white-ball ground.

Nobody set out to make it one. The drift happened because floodlights, capacity and a comfortable climate are exactly what a tournament organiser wants, while a home Test programme of two or three series a year gets allocated to Colombo and Galle on commercial and cricketing grounds respectively. The result is a venue that is busy, well used and only occasionally doing the job it was built for.

Three innings and a spell

Four performances account for most of what Pallekele is known for, and three of them are in the short formats.

Glenn Maxwell, 6 September 2016. Maxwell made 145 in a Twenty20 international, at the time the second-highest individual score in the format, and Australia made 263 — then the highest team total in Twenty20 internationals. It is still the outstanding batting performance the ground has seen.

Lasith Malinga, September 2019. Malinga took four wickets in four consecutive balls against New Zealand, the first time that had been done in a Twenty20 international. Malinga had already achieved four in four in a one-day international earlier in his career, which makes him the only bowler to have managed it in both formats.

Pathum Nissanka, February 2024. Nissanka made 210 not out, becoming the first Sri Lankan to score a double century in a one-day international. For a country that has produced Sanath Jayasuriya, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene, the fact that the first Sri Lankan ODI double hundred waited until 2024 says something about how the format changed rather than about those players.

Suranga Lakmal's first ball, December 2010. Less spectacular than the others and the only one from a Test, and the ground's own founding moment. It is also the only one of the four that could never be repeated here, since a venue gets one first ball in Test cricket and Pallekele has used it.

Detail	Pallekele
Opened	27 November 2009
Seated capacity	Around 35,000
Location	About 15 km east of Kandy on the A26
Ends	Hunnasgiriya End and Rikillagaskada End
First Test	1–5 December 2010, against the West Indies
First one-day international	8 March 2011, New Zealand against Pakistan, 2011 World Cup
First Twenty20 international	6 August 2011, against Australia
Tests staged	Nine, with Sri Lanka's record there modest by home standards
Floodlights	Yes; the ground hosts day-night limited-overs cricket

What the surface does, and what it does not

Pallekele's pitch is the least Sri Lankan of the country's major squares, and that is meant descriptively rather than as a criticism.

It has generally behaved as a good batting surface. It offers the seamers something with a new ball, particularly under early cloud, and it does not take the sharp early turn that makes a Galle Test a specialist exercise. Spin becomes effective as the match goes on rather than from the first session, which is why Pallekele Tests have tended towards draws more often than Sri Lanka's coastal venues.

For limited-overs cricket that combination is close to ideal, and it is a large part of why the ground gets the fixtures it does. Two hundred and sixty in a Twenty20 international is not a total any Colombo ground has produced, and it happened here.

The hill-country weather is the variable that cannot be designed around. Rain in the Central Province arrives more readily than on the southern coast, and both Tests and limited-overs matches at Pallekele have been shortened by it. That risk is one reason Sri Lanka Cricket has been cautious about allocating five-day fixtures here, and it applies at the Dambulla ground to a much smaller degree because the dry zone is drier.

Attending a match

Practical points for anyone planning a visit.

• The ground is outside Kandy rather than in it. Nearly everyone stays in Kandy and travels out by road, which takes longer than fifteen kilometres suggests on a match day.
• Kandy itself is the reason to make the trip: the Temple of the Tooth, the lake, the hill railway from Colombo and the surrounding tea country are all within reach, and the town has by far the widest accommodation choice of any Sri Lankan cricket destination outside Colombo.
• The climate is the most comfortable of any Sri Lankan international ground. It is cooler than Colombo, Galle or Dambulla, and shade matters less. Rain matters more; take a plan for a washed-out session.
• Crowds are large for Sri Lanka fixtures against India and for World Cup matches, and thin for bilateral series against other opponents.
• If you are in Kandy in the first quarter of the year, the schools cricket is worth as much of your time as the international game. The Trinity and St Anthony's encounter is one of the country's oldest fixtures and is covered in the guide to Sri Lanka's big match tradition.

The wider Kandy cricket landscape, including Asgiriya and the schools that dominate the district, is set out in the guide to cricket in Kandy. The other international venues are compared in the Sri Lankan cricket grounds guide, and the rest of the country's game is indexed on the cricket in Sri Lanka hub.

Sources and method

This guide is based on published ground records for Pallekele International Cricket Stadium, including its opening date, construction cost, capacity, end names and first international fixtures in each format, on official scorecards for the performances described, and on the published venue allocations for the 2011 World Cup, the 2012 World Twenty20 and the 2026 Men's T20 World Cup. Match totals by format change with every fixture and are given approximately. The renaming proposal of July 2010 is reported as announced and not implemented. Descriptions of pitch behaviour are drawn from the match record and published assessments rather than from measurement, and nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.